


The World Has No Name

by CateyedCrow



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Gen, Poetic nonsense, Tarot Cards, musings in the desert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-03
Updated: 2018-07-03
Packaged: 2019-06-04 21:21:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15155882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CateyedCrow/pseuds/CateyedCrow
Summary: A short piece from some years ago, first written as part of a DW/LJ RP. But I'm fond of it. It's a partial remix of some other works too.Set during Roland's pursuit of Walter/Flagg across the desert, here are some Thoughts, courtesy of Flagg.





	The World Has No Name

The dark was coming down across the desert and with the wind was rising. So endeth another day. And still he was followed. That was good. Good ol' Roland Deschain, that last gunslinger, followed him yet and he led forward (or perhaps they simply moved along the same path, which could be likely too), and that was as it should be.

Whether following or chasing, no, that man would not desist--with that plodding, tenacious mind of his--yes, it was something to admire. No sharpness here, no quickness, no bright flash of intelligent teeth to grip at a thought or an understanding. It was an alien country, an alien world. When Roland understood, it was nigh unto being beaten to death with something roughly amounting to logic. That was a mind to be watched and it pleased this man in his dark hood to consider the workings of that mind--like great iron wheels, like the grinding force of some old steam locomotive (all rusted and lost, o lost, alas Babylon, in this time and place). Inexorable, unrelenting, the lapping of the sea at the foot of a mountain that, grain by grain, it would wear away. Because so the sea must. The patience, too, then, of the seaweeds, carried on the tides forever. Day by day: night by night: lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary; and, whispered to, they sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting, awaiting the fullness of their times, _diebus ac noctibus iniurias patiens ingemiscit._

Let them groan. The sea was still very far away now and the desert lay in defiance of it still, as though some part of the world could deny another's existence. But so it could, and so it could seem to those within the one or the other. A landscape more inhospitable and more superficially illusionary wherein there may be water and rock and so here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Neither desert nor sea was such a place for Man. One was too much, the other two little. And which was which--?

If there were water among the rock...

The dark was falling, so he gathered and bundled the devil grass, the only stuff that grew in this place and the only stuff that would burn. Never mind what the smoke did (or the stuff itself, especially to those who found themselves eating it, bless their hearts). That was of no concern to him. He bound it into bundles and set to building the structures that would burn down to the scorched ideograms that marked his passing. No need to cut for sign here, gunslinger: it is written.

Not that he suspected the man who followed him--nigh a great, inescapable, following force more than a man, more at maelstrom than man--would pay mind to the signs beyond their presence. Truly, a disappointment to some degree, to have such signs wasted on those who would not see. He lit the fire with matches. He would light it with magic later, when he was caught, because then--then--the gunslinger would see. He would be made to.

But, then, admire the tenacity instead. For now. He thought, perhaps, that if the gunslinger following ran himself to death, his corpse itself would drag itself forward by its fingers for...who knew how many miles? But he wouldn't run himself to death. He knew that. There was yet too much to be done. Death was not for him.

The gunslinger had followed when he had fled into the desert. This was the first step. The trap in Tull had been set and sprung. That was another. Imagine that a sacrifice, if it pleased one to do so. A blood-offering to a thirsty desert--and not one alone but the whole of a town. He had been gone, _long_ gone, when it was sprung and done, but he knew well enough how it would end. There was more yet to come. But there were not many days now left before the end--the end of the beginning, or perhaps only the beginning of the beginning. He grinned at that.

And beyond? And after? Beyond the desert, beyond the sea, beyond a hundred thousand thousand degradations of the spirit, there stood the Tower. It could yet be...

There were better nights in the desert: walking through the night only to a distant light and to come upon a burning tree in the dark, where he knelt in the hot sand while all about in that circle attended wolves and jackals and crows and vultures with their obscene boiled heads and their benevolent attitudes like dark bishops and companies of lesser auxilaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegaroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jedda, in Babylon; a constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the icy desert stars in their sockets

He hunched before the fire, and ate what food he had hidden in his robes. The wind pulled out his robes behind him like misplaced shreds of the night themselves. He raced the wind in his rags. In the great distance, the footless and floating mountains beckoned. He carried his Tarot cards in his robes too and they weighted a pocket and waited in that pocket. Mend with patience, and be better at thy leisure. The blind interlocutrix between Boaz and Jachin inscribed upon the one card, _La Papesse_ , Pope Joan. The scorched and frozen wheel that turns as it will, beyond fate or will, moving under consignment to some third and other destiny. The Four Beasts: Bull, Lion, Man, Eagle, winged and bearing up the corners of the world. 

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,  
Bless the bed that I lie on.  
Four corners to my bed,  
Four angels round my head;  
One to watch and one to pray  
And two to bear my soul away.

Falsity and children's songs. No bed. No soul neither. Tsk tsk.

The dark came down and, after a time, he slept in the warmth of his fire and paid no mind to the dreams and hallucinations and madness the smoke of the devil grass might bring. He might even welcome such things. He might even greet them as friends returning again.

***

He woke after a time in the dark with the fire burned low. The last of the ragged flames fled down the wind. There had been another time and place, "many and many-a" as they say, when he had only traveled at night. Strictly the night shift. Those were wandering days, those warm-cool vanilla American summer evenings on dark back roads and narrow two-lane highways, clocking in his miles on the glittering asphalt in the same old battered boots. Some things do not change. And he had lighted fires for another then too, yes, but the fires he had lit for her were of another kind entirely. But they had burned so brightly and for her. And later there had been a desert then too, and a fire made of what little the desert would offer. So do all things pass.

He stayed wakeful for a time and listened to his own mind in the silence. A poem, barely recalled, drifted up to the surface and through his plans and intentions laid out before his own mind's eyes like so many cards:

_My darkling child, the stars have obeyed in your deliverance and laid you cold on the doorstep of a house where few are happy and times get worse._

It suited.


End file.
